Need advice on in ear buds please

Hi everyone, I am new to the site and am looking for all the help I can get. Been drumming for about 16 years, mostly garage stuff. Over the past year I have joined a worship band at my church and have played about 3 times live during service so far on a rotating schedule. I have realized that due to cheaper equipment and poor acoustics, my ability to hear the other instr. has really been compromised. The wedge monitor that is being used to pipe sound to the drummers is weak at best. Due to the exorbanent cost of wireless IEM and my dislike of traditional over the ear headphones, does anyone recommend an in ear bud type earphone that can be linked to the mixing board with just a simple connection.

A 1/8 to 1/4 adapters are an option, and I personally love skullcandy in ears.

If they do not have an 1/8 or 1/4 female hookup for you to go into with your in ears you'll probably need something like this http://www.samash.com/webapp/wcs/st...r_-1_10052_10002_-49991254_cmCategorySA-10001

You'd run the 1/4 plug that would to into the wedge monitor into the amplifier then plug your in-ears into the amplifier to control your volume.

If you don't go custom having an audiologist make the in-ears for you then I'd take a look at something like the Sure EC2's they have a bunch of different ear pieces you can use to somewhat custom fit to your ears. I picked mine up at Sam's for $69, most music shops were selling them for $100+

The m audios are a little bit more expensive than the shures but there well worth it.
Like $30 more, you can find them for under $90

johnnyrokz said:

Hi everyone, I am new to the site and am looking for all the help I can get. Been drumming for about 16 years, mostly garage stuff. Over the past year I have joined a worship band at my church and have played about 3 times live during service so far on a rotating schedule. I have realized that due to cheaper equipment and poor acoustics, my ability to hear the other instr. has really been compromised. The wedge monitor that is being used to pipe sound to the drummers is weak at best. Due to the exorbanent cost of wireless IEM and my dislike of traditional over the ear headphones, does anyone recommend an in ear bud type earphone that can be linked to the mixing board with just a simple connection.

Click to expand...

A Shure PSM-200 body pack (and other Shure varieties) has a 1/4" plug direct in and a 1/8" out to whatever earbuds, or IEM's, you put on. The bodypack can work wirelessly, but you need the transmitter which makes the whole setup like $500+.

Either way...my church has a wedge monitor that sits right next to the drumkit. I hated the wedge so I started using my bodypack cause it had a 1/4" in...nice and easy to plug right in. The bodypack can take the input voltage coming off the amps/board and not blow up. Plus the bodypack has it's own volume control...again, nice and easy.

Seriously...they're worth their weight in gold...at least, your hearing is, right?

Find buds that offer good isolation. Etymotics, Shure, M-Audio, Ultimate Ears, and Westone all have fantastic offerings that could work for you.

I have an anvil case that allows me to have a monitoring rig that adapts to every drum monitor setup. I have a Berhinger mixer, Berhinger Ultra DI with two inputs and outputs, and a speak-on cable coupler and splitter (a cable I soldered together that goes from a speak-on adapter and splits it into two speaker cables).

I can put a line level signal into my mixer if the house is running a powered monitor. If they are powering the monitor via 1/4" speaker cable I can take the cable and put it into my DI, which acts as a power soak, and the DI goes into the mixer. If they are running a speak-on monitor, the coupler goes into the DI box and then into the mixer.

Under $100 and it works everywhere and sounds great.

Do a google search for OSP EU-4 in-ears.
They are awesome, and they have a large driver and provide great isolation.
They usually run for around $60, and they are the equivalent to the Shure in-ears, but much cheaper.

Thanks to everyone for your thoughts, I will start looking around now that you've given me some direction.

Ian said:

Find buds that offer good isolation. Etymotics, Shure, M-Audio, Ultimate Ears, and Westone all have fantastic offerings that could work for you.

I have an anvil case that allows me to have a monitoring rig that adapts to every drum monitor setup. I have a Berhinger mixer, Berhinger Ultra DI with two inputs and outputs, and a speak-on cable coupler and splitter (a cable I soldered together that goes from a speak-on adapter and splits it into two speaker cables).

I can put a line level signal into my mixer if the house is running a powered monitor. If they are powering the monitor via 1/4" speaker cable I can take the cable and put it into my DI, which acts as a power soak, and the DI goes into the mixer. If they are running a speak-on monitor, the coupler goes into the DI box and then into the mixer.

Under $100 and it works everywhere and sounds great.

Click to expand...

Hi Ian, what you have there sounds interesting but a tad confused about it all connects together and the purpose of everything.

Ian said:

Find buds that offer good isolation. Etymotics, Shure, M-Audio, Ultimate Ears, and Westone all have fantastic offerings that could work for you.

I have an anvil case that allows me to have a monitoring rig that adapts to every drum monitor setup. I have a Berhinger mixer, Berhinger Ultra DI with two inputs and outputs, and a speak-on cable coupler and splitter (a cable I soldered together that goes from a speak-on adapter and splits it into two speaker cables).

I can put a line level signal into my mixer if the house is running a powered monitor. If they are powering the monitor via 1/4" speaker cable I can take the cable and put it into my DI, which acts as a power soak, and the DI goes into the mixer. If they are running a speak-on monitor, the coupler goes into the DI box and then into the mixer.

Under $100 and it works everywhere and sounds great.

Click to expand...

It sounds great, but now can you say it english? LOL. Please simplify for the technically disabled. I'm not totally out to lunch when it comes to this stuff, but I don't work for Nasa either. thanks

Frank

Ian said:

Find buds that offer good isolation. Etymotics, Shure, M-Audio, Ultimate Ears, and Westone all have fantastic offerings that could work for you.

I have an anvil case that allows me to have a monitoring rig that adapts to every drum monitor setup. I have a Berhinger mixer, Berhinger Ultra DI with two inputs and outputs, and a speak-on cable coupler and splitter (a cable I soldered together that goes from a speak-on adapter and splits it into two speaker cables).

I can put a line level signal into my mixer if the house is running a powered monitor. If they are powering the monitor via 1/4" speaker cable I can take the cable and put it into my DI, which acts as a power soak, and the DI goes into the mixer. If they are running a speak-on monitor, the coupler goes into the DI box and then into the mixer.

Under $100 and it works everywhere and sounds great.

Click to expand...

Dude, thanks for this info. I just upgraded to this per your suggestions.

The break down for this stuff is as follows.

If the signal for your monitor is a line level (aka running straight from the board and not powering a monitor) then you can plug it into a mini sound board and plug your headphones/IEM into that.

If your signal is being sent is a powered signal (aka powers a monitor) then you can't just run that into the board because the signal is way too strong.
- thus you need a direct box with an attenuator (most models offer some type of attenuator), something along the line of a -40 db cut will do it. From the direct box you can run that to a mini mixer and use your headphones/IEM.

If the powered signal is a regular 1/4 in jack for the speakers you can run that right into the direct box.
If the cable is a Speakon jack instead of 1/4in jack then you need an adapter that connects a Speakon cable to a 1/4in so you can plug it into the direct box.

I bought an adapter from a store on ebay. http://cgi.ebay.com/2-Female-Speakon-to-1-4-Female-Locking-Adapters-New_W0QQitemZ200273121146QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item200273121146&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1234|66%3A2|65%3A12|39%3A1|240%3A1318|301%3A0|293%3A1|294%3A50

To simplify this, these are the three different options depending on your situation.

1) Line level signal -> mixer -> headphones
2) 1/4in powered signal -> direct box -> mixer -> headphones
3) Speakon style powered signal -> adapter from speakon to 1/4 in jack -> direct box -> mixer -> headphones

I know this is a late reply. This is for any drummers who stumble upon this post like I did. A couple answers on here are cool, but do yourself a favor & use your own small mixer to submix your drums & whatever else you want in your iem's. I started out splitting only my kick drum & my vocals @ my mixer which gave me total control over them both with eq & volume. This works great since I only use single driver iem's. Since then I always split my whole kit. Here's how: the drum mics go into splitters (poor man's splitters - xlr male to 2 xly females). 1 xlr female goes to my submixer & the other goes to the front house mixer or snake. That way I have total control of my own iem mix & they have total control over the mix out front. I never have to rely on the engineer for my personal monitor mix which is the same every night I play. I can control eq & volume on each individual drum. Thus giving me the control to make my single driver monitors use their full & capable frequency range. For kick drum I boost the highs @ 1-2 oclock, mids @ 9 oclock & the lows @ 3 oclock. This gives me a huge fat kick drum sound. I can never understand why some peeps always try to convince us drummers that you need dual or triple drivers to achieve a proper kick drum sound. Its not true, I just explained the simple & inexpensive process for getting a huge kick drum sound from single driver iem's. You do that same process with every channel you use on your mixer. Also, you can get an aux send from the front house mixer to a channel in your mixer that the engineer can send you any instrument, vocal or sequence. I always like to put click in it's own channel so it is very easy to change volumes depending on the song...... I hope this helps anybody out there trying to learn how iem's work for us drummers......... Murdock the Drummer